Curated by Melissa Joplin Higley
Books on our radar this month, new and coming soon!
Jennifer Gravley, The Story I Told My Mother: Poems and an Essay, Twelve Winters Press, September 2023, poetry.
The first book from short story writer, poet, and essayist Jennifer Gravley, The Story I Told My Mother questions what it means to be the adult daughter of a mother—and eventually, a daughter without a mother. The opening poems, anchored in this inevitably fraught relationship, recount a desire for connection that is ultimately unachievable with the death of Gravley’s mother. The concluding hermit crab essay contends with the messiness and interrupting quality of grief through formal restraint, delivering a ferocious gut punch. For Gravley, language and storytelling are a way forward, and wielding them rebuilds her world and self.
Nadia Alexis, Beyond the Watershed, CavanKerry Press, March 2025, poetry.
Bringing together poetry and photography, Beyond the Watershed explores generational trauma, domestic violence, healing, and reclamation through a Haitian American daughter and her Haitian immigrant mother’s experiences. In her vital poetic debut, Nadia Alexis traces journeys to break free–documenting pain, making space for light, connecting with spirit, and becoming a reckoning on paths to safe waters and transformation.
Adrie Rose, Rupture, Gold Line Press, January 2024, poetry.
Winner of the 2022 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Contest, Rupture is a haunting, tender, and sensual debut chapbook. Exploring both the before and after of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy (in which a fertilized egg implants in the fallopian tube and splits it open, causing life-threatening internal bleeding) the poems in Rupture are lyrical, darkly funny, and determined in their examination of both desire and loss. This book confronts the body’s loves and their costs, asking “Who chooses / what survives, and why? / July brings back / roses everywhere / as if we were celebrating.” Set in a landscape lushly alive with wild plants and changing seasons, these poems enter the daily devotions of caregiving and endurance.
Martha Silano, This One We Call Ours, Lynx House Press, September 2024, poetry.
Martha Silano’s award-winning new collection is a passionate cry on behalf of the Earth and all who dwell upon it. Very few poets have dared to show us, so clearly, the edge of peril to which we have brought our only home. This is a staggeringly important book.
Sandra Fees, Wonderwork, BlazeVOX Books, October 2024, poetry.
The lyrical poems in Wonderwork explore the pressing questions of human meaning-making, reflecting on grief, spirituality and memory. The collection offers intimate, necessary moments of curiosity and hope in a world that is at once both heartbreaking and beautiful, difficult and joyful. Drawing subtle parallels between the landscape of self and the landscape of place, Wonderwork undertakes a personal search for healing that echoes a larger planetary need for wholeness.
Sarah Yahm, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, Dzanc Books, May 2025, literary fiction (novel).
The night after fleeing her mother’s funeral, cellist Louise Rakoff meets aspiring therapist Leon Rosenberg at a Rosh Hashanah dinner in 1974. Over the next two decades, they build a marriage and a family based on honesty, argument, and a shared appreciation of the absurd. But that rock-solid foundation crumbles when Louise is diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease—the same one responsible for her mother’s slow, agonizing passing. Bursting with humor and heartbreak, and inspired by Yahm’s own experience as a disabled author facing the existential terror of parenting while ill, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation leaps into the trials of motherhood, the impossibility of adolescence, the hopelessness of grief, and all the wild beauty and hilarity that makes life worth living anyway.
Natalie Solmer, Water Castle, Kelsay Books, September 2024, poetry.
The poems of Natalie Solmer’s Water Castle both seek and resist homeland, from ancestral Eastern Europe, to immigrant grandparents in America’s Rust Belt, to her partner’s, and therefore her children’s, Caribbean origins. Our speaker is raised among the empty factories of a city on the wane, mint fields, ethanol plants, a winding river, “holy with bacteria” and tainted by White history, and a Great Lake. Fluidity is everywhere—river, lake, ocean, ghosts, rain, milk, blood—a fluidity of memory wending into “the not-past-past,” and a multiplicity of selves. What holds firm is the Water Castle of the imagination, of language, and of love. Solmer, “without kingdom,” paints for us a watery queendom. Her debut collection offers us a deeply honest, lyric pushback against erasure.—Diane Seuss
Linda McCauley Freeman, The Marriage Manual, Backroom Window Press, April 2024, poetry.
The Marriage Manual is an intense poetic journey through two marriages, and the lessons the narrator learns about the myth of happily ever after. Relying on both narrative and lyrical sequences, as well as haiku-like explorations, the book takes the reader through the emotional geography of married love and the ever-repeating cycle of romantic love, hope, disappointment, despair, fear, joy and, finally, mature love. “Read The Marriage Manual and enter love in all its incarnations.” ––Darcy Smith, author of River Skin
Interested in reviewing one of these or another book on our list? Email us at [email protected].